Eltham Term Week 1 2018

Hello everyone and welcome to the Eltham blog and our final term for the year! We love coming back to work in the Eltham area as there are so many wonderful people and services to work with. The blog will be updated each week with an insight into the activities we've been doing as well as photos. Wednesday started off with our new group meeting at Eltham train station. With great acknowledgement to the young people, they were all there on time and ready to go! Once we had everyone we headed straight to Eltham leisure centre to met Jordan the gym manager. Over this term we will be participating in a number of sessions with Jordan. Together we all started the day with some getting to know you activities. It was great to see how quickly everyone engaged and got comfortable with each other. After we had broken the ice we went straight into setting our code of conduct for the term. These are a set of values that the young people decide on and commit themselves to abiding by. This terms code of conduct values are cooperation, trust, positive attitude, honesty and team work. After this we broke for lunch at the park and then headed back to start our fitness testing and swim test. The fitness tests are comprised of activities like push ups, sit ups, 40m sprints, sit and reach test and more. We do these tests at the start and the end of the term to see if the young people have had improvements in fitness/strength and flexibility. For those of us that came prepared we jumped in the pool to test our swimming ability. For those who forgot we did journal writing. Overall it was a great first day and one that has us all excited for the rest of the term!

Thursday was a busy day on the program as as we headed out to the beautiful Dandenong Ranges. First up we did the Kokoda memorial 1000 Steps hike. We do this hike as a practice in the lead up to our You Yangs camp. Students took turns in being leader and learning to travel together as a group, as well as learning some facts about the Kokoda Trail. It was great to see everyone supporting each other during the hike and take in the natural beauty of the rainforest that we were in. After this we headed to Belgrave for Trees Adventure. Trees Adventure is a series of obstacle courses high up in the trees. Students move themselves around the course and are faced with flying foxes, huge cargo nets, free falls and a wide range of other obstacles. All of the students took on the challenges well and worked hard to overcome their fears. It was a tiring day overall but a successful one in setting up standards for the rest of the term.

Friday was a quieter day as we headed to Collingwood Alternative school to work on our character strengths. The young people listened well and were all able to do the quiz and get their 24 character strengths ratings. During this session we also met the gang from REACH to prepare for nexts weeks workshops with them. To finish the day we headed out to Melbourne Polytechnic at Fairfield for a Landscaping taster. The students worked extremely well with Tim to lay their own paving in a quick and timely fashion. It was great to see the young people learn the new skills and get an insight into what other pathway options can be like.